State Gop Faces Daunting Task Selling Bush

Gop Optimistic, But Faces Daunting Task Selling Bush

HOUSTON — Optimism is gushing out of their political pores, and the question is: Why?

After all, Connecticut Republicans have a daunting task.

The economy has crushed so many potential supporters.

In a state that's so defense-oriented, the president has proposed killing the Groton-made Seawolf submarine and has not pushed for quick production of the Comanche helicopter, programs that affect thousands of defense workers.

And there are other complications. In a state of moderates, the job will be to sell a national platform that's staunchly conservative.

Yet as Connecticut delegates prepare to head home from the Republican convention, they think they can persuade Connecticut voters to support the GOP ticket by stressing President Bush's experience in foreign policy and by blaming Congress for most of the nation's economic problems.

"I came here ambivalent and I am leaving energized," said U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4th District, a moderate whose district includes Greenwich, where Bush spent his childhood.

Delegates also say that even though Connecticut is not a conservative state on social policy -- its laws support abortion rights and gay rights -- voters across the state will not be turned away by the platform.

As Bush arrives in the state Monday to campaign at Ansonia's Warsaw Park, he will face local polls that show him and Vice President Dan Quayle trailing Democratic nominees Bill Clinton and Al Gore in one of the four states that Bush claims as home.

Bush can expect an upward bounce in public opinion polls after this week's nominating convention and the president will attempt to capitalize on that in his campaign trips to Connecticut and New Jersey Monday.

"I think he sells himself in many respects," said Christine Dudley, who has been brought in by the Republican National

Committee to run the daily Bush-Quayle re-election effort in Connecticut.

And when he can't sell himself, the Connecticut Republicans, who have been busily honing their spiel this week in Houston, will stress his foreign policy experience and his limited reduction in overall defense spending, and by insisting that it is the Democratically controlled Congress' fault -- not the president's -- that the economy is stalled.

The decidedly optimistic delegation, whose enthusiasm for the GOP ticket has been growing daily, still concedes the job ahead is tough.

"We have to go out and campaign town by town," said Jo McKenzie of Madison, one of Connecticut's two members of the Republican National Committee.

Though hopeful, Shays, McKenzie and others in the delegation acknowledge that they believe the dismal economic picture is the biggest problem Bush faces.

"The credit crunch is the biggest obstacle. It is difficult to overcome, and it shouldn't have happened," Shays said.

He said that meetings by New England lawmakers with top Bush administration officials such as Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and Office of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman were fruitless. "They paid us lip service," he said.

Jay Malcynsky, a New Britain lawyer and alternate delegate, said that Bush also had been hampered before Thursday night's speech because he had yet to spell out a clear vision of himself, his accomplishments and his plan for the future.

"He had to convince people that he has an economic policy that is viable, particularly in states like Connecticut and the Northeast," Malcynsky said.

Dudley, whose job will involve helping state Republicans get the president's message across, offered this guideline to Connecticut Republicans.

"I don't think people blame problems on the president. They blame the Democrat Congress," Dudley said.

"For people to blame the president for having no domestic policy, it is really Congress' fault," Shays said.

The Connecticut delegates also say they will try to convince voters that his approach to health care will benefit the insurance industry's legions of workers in Connecticut by relying more heavily on private insurance than does a plan espoused by the Democrats.

Still, there are problems in Connecticut for the GOP ticket, the delegates said. Social issues are among them.

In the case of the hotly contested abortion plank, voters still may have trouble sorting out the various messages on the abortion issue that emanated from the GOP in the past two weeks, Malcynsky said. While the platform is firmly against abortion, the president, the vice president and Barbara Bush all have suggested that they are willing to tolerate other views.

But pro-choice delegates from Connecticut such as state Senate Minority Leader M. Adela Eads of Kent said that issue will not be the one that sways most voters one way or another.

"I am not going to vote someone in or out just on one issue," she said. As do many Connecticut delegates, she believes reporters have overplayed the significance of the abortion issue.